The King of Pointland

He's a lying, murdering sack of shit, whether he comprehends it or not.

It should be noted that investigations have found evidence of WMD programs, including weaponizing ricin, and illegal missile R&D. Saddam's nuclear weapon research group was maintained, materials kept, and some "relatively unsophisticated research initiatives that could be applied to nuclear weapons development" continued up to the war. There are indications that this group has an interest, beginning in 2002, in reconstituting a centrifuge enrichment program.

In David Kay's Testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee, Jan. 28, 2004, he said:

"Iraq was in clear and material violation of 1441. They maintained programs and activities, and they certainly had the intentions at a point to resume their program. So there was a lot they wanted to hide because it showed what they were doing that was illegal. I hope we find even more evidence of that."

You might find this Fred Kaplan piece interesting, too:

"At least one senior Iraqi official believed that by 2000 Saddam had run out of patience with waiting for sanctions to end and wanted to restart the nuclear program," the report notes.

However, the evidence that Saddam acted on this impatience is flimsy at best. "Starting around 2000," the report states, Dr. Khalid Ibrahim Sa'id, Saddam's senior atomic-energy official (who was killed during the fall of Baghdad when his driver tried to run a U.S. roadblock), "began several small and relatively unsophisticated research initiatives that could be applied to nuclear weapons development."

The report adds, "These initiatives did not in and of themselves constitute a resumption of the nuclear weapons program, but could have been useful in developing a weapons-relevant science base for the long-term." This sentence, which seems very carefully written, is so devoid of meaning that it could accurately be invoked to describe the purchase of a college-level textbook in nuclear physics.

The Pentagon team also found "indications" of "interest, beginning in 2002, in reconstituting a centrifuge enrichment program"—but nothing of actual reconstitution.

This article is also good.